Technical Article

A Catch from the Codeshare: Let's Encrypt

On the side of the road in northern Missouri just north of Mark Twain’s stomping grounds, there is a slice of hillside removed just to the side of the highway. In Arkansas, there’s a nondescript field tucked away in a state park. Short of word of mouth and this thing they call the internet, you wouldn’t be any the wiser that buried or surfaced in these two locations are an amazing variety of geodes and diamonds, respectively. In this article series I will explore recent and well-aged gems from the codeshare, highlighting inventive solutions contributed by you, the community. Please join me on this great adventure as we oscillate on the Mohs’ scale of codeshare geekery.

Let’s Encrypt

Jumping in the wayback machine to 2014 (that’s so two years ago!) Let’s Encrypt had a call to action changing the certificate paradigm, it’s key principles being:

Secure - platform for modern security techniques and best practices (ok, a little marketing ambiguity on this one)

Transparent - all issuance/revocation records available to anyone anytime for inspection.

Open - issuance/renewal protocols open standard and mostly open source

Cooperative - larger community of control than any one organization.

Not a bad charter at all. Well, fast forward to present day and there’s a fully functional public beta implementation of Let’s Encrypt in the wild! And even better, DevCentral community member lnxgeek has developed and documented a solution to use Let’s Encrypt certificates, and maintain them, on your BIG-IP! In fact, he’s documented his process so well that I don’t need to do any reinventing in this space at all, just hit the link above and check out this solution solution contributed to the codeshare!